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Friday, May 17, 2013

The statue in alchemy

Statues have been
associated with religion and spirituality from earliest recorded time to the present-day. 'From the Minoan Age and throughout the Mediterranean world of antiquity,
statuettes of gods in human or animal shape were carved from terracotta,
bronze, wood, or stone. They had religious significance and were deposited in graves or dedicated to the gods in shrines and in private homes, where they exercised a protective influence upon the dead, upon the community or upon the family. They were tutelary symbols'. [1] The statue also performs a number of roles within the
western esoteric traditions of hermeticism and alchemy. In the Corpus
Hermeticum, a mixture of Egyptian, Greek and Gnostic wisdom
texts originating from the early Christian era, a dialogue between the
mythic sage Hermes Trismegistus and Asclepius occurs. Trismegistus
celebrates humankind’s ability for learning the art of “god-making” – making
statues come alive by drawing divine powers into them, stating-

TRISMEGISTUS : But the figures
of gods that humans form have been shaped from both natures - from the divine,
which is purer and more divine by far, and from the material of which they are
built, whose nature falls short of the human - and they represent not only the
heads but all the limbs and the whole body. Always mindful of its nature and
origin, humanity persists in imitating divinity, representing its gods in
semblance of its own features, just as the father and master made his gods
eternal to resemble him.

I mean statues ensouled and
conscious, filled with spirit and doing great deeds; statues that foreknow the
future and predict it by lots, by prophecy, by dreams and by many other means;
statues that make people ill and cure them, bringing them pain and pleasure as
each deserves’. [2]

After being damaged in an earthquake in 27 BCE the eastern colossus of Memnon, one of two statues of the ruler Amenhotep III (14th century BCE) was believed to emit sound. Many travelers
throughout antiquity travelled to Egypt to
visit Amenhotep’s statue in the hope of hearing it, including Roman Emperors. The Greek
historian Strabo, the travelogue author Pausanias and the Roman satirist
Juvenal, all claimed to have heard Amenhotep’s statue. Pausanias compared
its sound to 'the string of a lyre breaking’, Strabo reported it sounding, 'like
a blow', but its sound was also likened to the striking of brass or
whistling.

The seminal Swiss psychologist C.G. Jung in his Mysterium coniunctionis (1956) observed - ‘the statue plays a mysterious role in ancient alchemy’[3]. Jung noted that the medieval cleric Thomas Norton (1433-1513) in his Ordinall of
Alchemy depicts the seven metals/planets as statues. In the anthology
of alchemical texts Aurora Consurgens (1566) Mother Alchemy
or mater alchemia is portrayed as a statue of different metals,
as are the seven statues in the writings of Raymond Lully. In the German
Rosicrucian Michael Maier’s Symbola aureae mensae (1617) the
protagonist on his peregrinations through the continents encounters a statue of a golden-headed Mercurius who points in the direction of Paradise.

Commenting upon the
biblical verse, ‘And this stone, which I have set for a pillar, shall be God’s
house’. (Genesis 28: 22) C.G. Jung theorized - ‘If our conjecture is correct,
the statue could therefore be the Cabbalistic equivalent of the lapis
philosophorum.’ [4] In agreement with the Gnostic’s teaching that the
biblical Adam was a 'corporeal or 'lifeless' statue, Jung concluded
his survey of the statue’s role in alchemy stating-

'The statue stands for
the inert materiality of Adam, who still needs an animating soul; it is thus a
symbol for one of the main preoccupations of alchemy'. [5]

Statues, as C.G. Jung
detected, are often encountered in alchemical themed artwork and
literature, frequently within the setting of a rose garden, sometimes
speaking or guiding the questing adept, or even emitting an ethereal light from
their eyes. The alchemical operations of thawing and warming in order to bestow
life upon the inert, readily lent itself to the notion of statues coming alive. The alchemical author J. D. Mylius (c.1583-1642) in his Philosophia Reformata (1622) stated –'It is a great mystery to create souls, and to mould the lifeless body into a living statue.’

In the first of the illustrated series of Philosophia
Reformata (above), a group of alchemists drink from statues which
spout wine. When intoxicated with vinum nostrum (our
wine) they walk into the dark corners of a mountain in order to begin the task of mining the prima materia from the rock, intending to refine its impure metals into gold.

There are other instances of statues becoming animated. and of their relationship to the esoteric in the arts. In Shakespeare’s late drama The Winter's Tale a statue by ‘that
rare Italian master, Julio Romano’ of Queen Hermione comes to life. In reality however, the Queen only imitates a
statue in pose before coming to life. [5]

The statue’s ability to transcendently communicate the invisible is alluded in Sir Thomas Browne’s discourse The Garden of Cyrus (1658) in the numerological observation-

‘in their groves of
the Sun this was a fit number, by multiplication to denote the days of the
year; and might Hieroglyphically speak as much, as the mystical Statua of
Janus in the Language of his fingers’.

But perhaps one of the most
dramatic of all tales of statues coming to life occurs in Mozart's opera Don
Giovanni (K527). Mozart’s anti-hero, hastily returning home at night after an amorous escape through a graveyard, encounters a statue. He dismissively invites it to dinner. In one of the most intense and
psychologically loaded acts of the entire operatic repertoire, the statue of the Commendatore calls upon the Don, knocking loud at his door. Failing to persuade him to
repent from his dissolute lifestyle, the Stone Guest requests the Don shake
hands with him. Locking his hand in an icy, unbreakable grip, the Stone Guest drags the unrepentant Don Giovanni down into the infernal regions.

The many and varied roles
the statue plays in the esoteric arts suggests that the four statuettes of
Christopher Layer’s funerary monument in the church of Saint John the Baptist at Maddermarket, Norwich, with their thinly-veiled planetary and elemental
symbolism, are superb examples of the statue’s role in
spiritual alchemy; for, to repeat, the reviving of the inert and inanimate soul of
man is fundamental to the alchemist’s quest to animate the spiritual
man within. If conjecture has any substance,the guiding
psychopomp of alchemy and the conductor of souls (frequently depicted standing upon a rotundum to
denote his world-wide influence in alchemical iconography) Mercurius, is alluded on the Layer monument in the form ofVanitas a playful, bubble-blowing
child standing upon a rotundum. [7]